While the recent GTA V trailers, previews and screenshots have overshadowed pretty much every other announcement in the GTA scene this week (and quite rightly so), that's not to say there's nothing worth reporting on. A couple of popular modifications and tools received updates over the past couple of days too.

MTASA 1.3.2 ReleasedFirst up is a new version of MTASA. That's the popular multiplayer modification for GTA: San Andreas for those of you who might be new to the franchise. MTASA 1.3.2 fixes a substantial amount of bugs, and also introduces useful new functions for those of you who make maps and create mods for the game. You can read more about that in their announcement post, or check their wiki for a complete list of changes.The MTA team also announced that they will be switching to a rapid release cycle. The team currently pushes a new release every 3-6 months, this change basically means the team will aim to release an update every month, rather like the release cycles users of Chrome and Firefox web browsers will now be used to. The more frequent updates will mean less major changes in each iteration, but will allow for fixes and small feature updates to be pushed out a lot faster than before. In general this is pretty good news, the only downside can be the ridiculous version numbers we end up with.

OpenIV 1.4 ReleasedGood news for those of you who make mods for Grand Theft Auto IV. GooD-NTS has released another update to his OpenIV tool, five years after the project originally started, and an update which will apparently be the last at least in terms of adding major new features.

The new features in this release are quite big indeed, though. The first is the ability to create your own unique animations for peds and objects, the second is the ability to create completely new custom cut-scenes. Other new features include an animation viewer for peds and objects, cutscene viewer, package installer (to make installing and distributing mods for GTAIV easier), new UI for the texture editor, and finally the ability to set file associations in Windows Explorer so you can open files directly in OpenIV.